Is Broward County's Curriculum Correct?

HIGH SCHOOLS - NEXT GENERATION

No

Practical Variety Could Be The Spice In Students' Lives

The problem with the Broward County school system is that most of the curriculum has no practical use.

How many people can claim occupations that force them to use the Pythagorean theorem or the atomic mass of hydrogen? Very few.

The average high school curriculum places too much emphasis on math and science.

While high school students are required to take three years of science - where they can learn everything from the amount of electrons in boron to the location of a crayfish thorax - no student is required to take a civics course where they could be taught how laws are passed or who represents them in Congress.

Civics courses are offered but not required. This situation conveys a message that finding the earthworm's dorsal side in biology is more important than the political infrastructure that has enormous effects on a student's life.

More students were made aware of the quadratic formula than Fort Lauderdale's new teen curfew.

I'm not arguing that high-level math and science courses should be eliminated; they just shouldn't be required and alternative courses should be offered.

High schools should be run like colleges so that students would have more opportunities to study a broad range of topics. Greater variety would increase the chances of a student finding something he or she really likes, and this would prompt students to become more interested in school.

Those rare students who feel they have a career in astrophysics should be allowed to discover their potential in the Broward County school system, but the sweeping majority who don't have a future in high-level science or math shouldn't be forced to sit through year after year studying those subjects.

Schools should teach us legal and political rights, not how to do a Punett square or how to measure a triangle.